give a fuck or give 'em hell, just not a chance to react.
Kim Namjoon never found his younger years to be unusual or particularly spectacular despite the happy, positive environment he grew up in. Rather, it was uninspired and forgettable with the daily ins and outs of a seemingly vanilla school life. Sure, it set the foundation of the man he was to become, but all the instances of skinned knees and bruises that went hand in hand with the times he threw punches on the playground while protecting his sister, well, they weren’t exactly things he looked back fondly on. If he really stopped to consider it, attempted to piece together moments of his youth that correlated with his senses as an adult, he’d realize that his entire existence was fairly unmemorable and edged on insignificant until the moment he woke up in the hospital with immense pain in his chest.
It was quite frightening for him to wake up to the soft beeps of a heart monitor and the cold, sterile scent of a hospital when he had just been in the car with his father, who—his mother informed him through a mix of tears and relief—also sustained injuries. But the pain and discomfort within his chest was more jarring, especially when a nurse stopped by with a police officer to explain everything that had happened. Tear of the aorta, she said. No seatbelt, he said. And he spent the rest of his recovery wondering, barely just a teenager, what existence meant to him if it could have been taken away from him in an instant. He pondered into the early hours if he could ever achieve a fulfilling sort of life even with its impromptu knocks.
Studying, though taxing and often boring to the average student, was one of Namjoon’s strong suits and a sure way that he could add to his fulfilling life. But all of his knowledge could only be spoken—in fact, he caught the eye of a Beta Chi Theta member during a heated debate about Schrödinger’s cat and was invited to join as a sophomore—and even though connecting everything he learned to the general idea of existence left him satisfied, he just didn’t feel complete. He harbored many passions, one of them being hip hop, and the another being the fashion and how it coincided with not only its own culture, but other styles. There was a grand disparity between the person he wanted to be and the person he felt he needed to be. And once Namjoon realized that, during a night of drinking and deep dissection of Ice Cube’s track entitled ‘It Was a Good Day’ with some friends, he ditched the path of studying philosophy and dove into fashion merchandising.
It was a new world. Namjoon didn’t think much of everything beyond the design of fashion or how many different veins of fashion there were as his own personal sense was miniscule in comparison. Even though switching majors was almost like starting over, he felt more human and connected to the world. On the other hand, it set him apart from the general atmosphere of the fraternity he joined, even though he shared the same intelligence. But, finally, it struck him in the midst of a lecture no less, existing wasn’t siphoning the knowledge of the world, it was discovering and functioning within purpose.